It's not just "now" insecure - it's always been insecure, but it's only now that we're finding out about it.

It was very secure because no one in the world knew how to break it.

Honestly, it's never been terrific. Any encryption you can accomplish with $5.00 of hardware is not going to be airtight by modern standards. Every improvement they made was broken in a few years at best. It was just never quite so trivial to do so as it is with this.

As access control, I'm not sure it's actually broken, either. This gives them the contents, but can they actually negotiate a connection and use the connection themselves?

Any encryption you can accomplish with $5.00 of hardware is not going to be airtight by modern standards.

That's so ... valueist ... monetarist ... costist ...

In a way it is. Brute force attacks are so cheap these days that real encryption, something that takes a significant amount of time to break, takes a nontrivial amount of work to encode in the first place. If something cheap and stupid can do it, it didn't take that much work.